Nut milk is a popular beverage, particularly for people who do not wish to consume dairy for either personal or medical reasons. The vast majority of nut milk is currently sold pre-made in stores. Pre-made nut milks are readily available but keeping the solids in suspension requires adding a lot of additive chemicals, negating many of the health and flavor benefits. While there are numerous nut milks on the market, most have extra ingredients that are often undesirable. For example, some contain tricalcium phosphate, a natural mineral salt that increases the calcium content of almond milk to that of dairy milk. It also contains carrageenan, a naturally occurring family of carbohydrates extracted from red seaweed. It is used to suspend calcium and vitamins, as they would settle at the bottom of containers without this additive. Non-organic nut milks contain ingredients such as gellan gum, used as a thickener and stabilizer, dipotassium phosphate, used in non-dairy creamers to prevent coagulation and xanthan gum, which prevents separation. While these ingredients have all been deemed safe for food use, there is some controversy as to how safe they are. As a result, many people have begun to make their own nut milk. Multiple recipes are easily found online. The process to make nut milk generally includes a ‘Nut Milk Bag” which is essentially a fine mesh cheesecloth bag. Making nut milk is also relatively inexpensive. Most recipes require one cup of nuts to every 4-6 cups of water.
There are known methods of producing nut milk fresh either at home or in a small retail location, however these all have numerous disadvantages. The most common method requires soaking the nuts over night in water, draining the water, adding fresh water and nuts to a blender, blending and straining through a staining bag. This is a very messy and time consuming process and much of the nut nutrients and flavor is lost when soaking and draining the over-night soaking water. The soaking is required to soften the nuts so that they will emulsify better in the blender, allowing finer particles to allow for better extraction of the nut nutrients when blended in water. If this step is not preformed there is much more pulp left in the straining bag, meaning less nut nutrients in the finished milk and greater food waste. Regardless of the length of soaking, current methods of manufacturing nut milk in small batches leave left over nut pulp that is not able to be emulsified into the nut milk. Soybella makes a soy milk maker that also has instructions for making nut milk. However, this machine produces the same results as above, with large amount of nut pulp left over and not incorporated into the nut milk.
Further, a way of producing nut butter is by pulverizing nuts in a food processor or blender, either for making nut milk as above or often because the nut butter itself is desired (e.g., in cooking, for use as a spread). However, the known devices do not sufficiently butter the nuts even after running the motor for an extended length of time, instead leaving behind chunks of unbuttered nut pieces. There are also nut butter devices on the market that are aimed at producing nut butter. However, these devices often require the addition of oils to help with the buttering process, as well as often being mostly only capable of buttering roasted nuts and teaching away from using raw nuts. For instance, Nostalgia makes a peanut butter maker that may also be used to butter other types of nuts, but instructs the addition of oil.
What is needed is a method to efficiently produce nut butter and nut milk in small batches with little or no waste of nut pulp, no time-consuming soaking step, and easy cleaning. A single small appliance that allows consumer to perform this method at home is also needed.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings.